Fiat Money, Fiat News

Kurosawa’s Rashomon is the defining movie of an Epsilon Theory world, where Narrative dominates and Truth with a capital T is nowhere to be found. The bandit, the wronged woman, the dead samurai, and the woodcutter witness all testify at trial, and the only certainty, as unsatisfying as it may be, is that we the jury will never know what truly happened in that forest. Such is life. Such is history. I think Kurosawa is spot on with his assessment of Japanese political culture, by the way. No anti-status quo Trump or Brexit votes there. Just the resignation of self-sacrifice and the long slow slide into irrelevance. To Counterfeit is DEATH.

Ben Franklin (1706 – 1790), from a 15 shilling note of his design For 600 years, from the 13th century to 1870, the punishment for counterfeiting in Great Britain and its colonies was the same as for high treason — to be hanged, drawn, and quartered. First you’d be slowly hanged, so that you came close to asphyxiation but couldn’t end the suffering by breaking your neck, then you’d be castrated, then you’d be disemboweled, and THEN you’d be killed by beheading. And then for good measure your headless body would be chopped into four pieces. British counterfeiters during the American Revolutionary War were known as “shovers” for their efforts to “shove” fake dollars into circulation and destabilize the Colonial government. One infamous shover, David Farnsworth, was arrested with more than 10,000 counterfeit dollars, a not-so-small fortune in 1778. George Washington called for Farnsworth to be tortured to death, but Farnsworth got off easy and was simply hanged. The largest counterfeiting operation in the history of economic warfare was Operation Bernhard, a German plan during the Second World War to destabilize the British economy by flooding the global economy with forged Bank of England notes. The forgeries are, for all practical purposes, indistinguishable from the originals. Alves dos Reis, instigator of the Portuguese Bank Note Crisis of 1925 and my choice for the greatest counterfeiter of all time. ADR didn’t print fake Portuguese currency. He printed fake instructions to the official banknote printers (famed London firm Waterlow and Sons) to print REAL notes equivalent in value to almost 1% of Portugal’s nominal GDP, and ship them to him directly. Gresham’s Law: bad money drives good money out of circulation.…